It pays ... not a lot, though I'm better off as an Indie Author thanks to the much better royalty rate. 80% of authors have a second job (last I checked the census, anyway), and I've bounced in and out of that over the years. I write full-time, and it pays for a good chunk of my expenses, but I still have had to do some work on the side outside of that for the last two years. There was a brief moment where it was all I needed ... and then the economic death of the last two years hit.

That said, each release I have moves my monthly income up another few notches and brings me to a wider audience. I've got people buying books all over the world now, with sales in Brazil, Germany, and Denmark (Axtara has been a real hit in other countries). It's a slow but steady process, but most authors who "make it" don't make enough to live off of for the first decade or so.

EDIT: I got time, so I'll run some math by you. Starforge, my newest book (the one that comes out tomorrow) is selling at $9.99. Which seems like a lot, but then my rate for the royalty is 70%. Which is really high, because I'm an indie author (a trad pub would be a lot less, in the realm of 15% if you're a rock-star to less than 5% if you're a nobody).

But for ease let's say I make $7 on each copy sold. So in order to make a minimum wage of $15 an hour, I'll need to sell more than three books an hour for eight hours. Let's chop a few sales off at the end of the day to account for rounding with our quick and dirty math, but that's still 18 copies in a day to make a minimum wage.

Now, I do have other books, but being older they're priced lower. Colony will be, once I do my inflation price adjustment (it's been a decade since I changed prices) $4.99. Roughly $3.50 per copy sold. So to make a day's minimum wage that's 36 copies sold in a day.

But printed books take things a step further. The bookstore wants their cut, which is usually about 50% of the cover price. In order to keep Axtara's paperback at $12, there are some markets where a sale of that $12 paperback only nets me about seven cents. Imagine how many copies I'd have to sell then to make a day's minimum wage. Since publishers want their share before the author, this is why that $45 hardback you just bought paid the author a dime (if they were lucky).

Point being, a lot of authors don't get paid a lot, and you need a lot of sales to make things work. I've been clawing my way up for ten years now, to the point that I make more in a month than I used to make in a whole year, but there's still plenty of room to grow.